When comparing PicoLisp vs Chicken, the Slant community recommends Chicken for most people. In the question“What are the best Lisp dialects?” Chicken is ranked 6th while PicoLisp is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Chicken is:
The Chicken community is very helpful and friendly.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Integrated database and Prolog engine
Pro Fast code execution speed
One of the fastest code execution speeds compared to other Lisp dialects.
Pro Simplicity
Compared to other Lisp dialects, it's simple and doesn't have unnecessary features.
Pro Tacit
Code written in is short and easier to understand most of the time.
Pro Foreign function interface
The language has built-in FFI for C and also interfaces with java(via ersatz)
Pro Friendly, welcoming community
The Chicken community is very helpful and friendly.
Pro Well documented
Chicken has easy to navigate and understand documentation that's updated frequently.
Pro Easy to embed
Likewise, FFI is very simple compared to most Scheme implementations.
Pro Compiles to native code
Pro chicken-doc
It has a tool named chicken-doc. With its help you can easily add autocomplete and documentation features to your favorite editor.
Pro Permissive BSD License
Cons
Con Lack of Floating point data type
The language does not have floating point numbers only scaled fix-point numbers. Scaling of numbers is more work than directly working with floats.
Con Lacks numeric tower support
The core system currently does not support the full numeric tower. However, there is an extension library available.
Con Lacks proper UTF-8 support
For more detail see http://bugs.call-cc.org/ticket/1374
It's been up there for 9 months, still not fixed.